Leaked email shows Salesforce once had Adobe on its target acquisition list

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff
Thomson Reuters
A leaked Colin Powell email from May shows Salesforce had 14 public companies on its acquisition target list, including Adobe, which now has a bigger market cap than Salesforce itself, according to The Wall Street Journal's Rachel King.

The email, which was leaked in September by DCLeaks, comes with a 60-slide presentation listing some of the companies Salesforce was considering for an acquisition at the time.

The companies identified in the email include Adobe, LinkedIn, Demandware, and Workday, as well as smaller companies like Box and Zendesk, the report said. Twitter, the social media company Salesforce was reported to be interested in buying last month, was not one of the 14 companies on the list.

Powell had access to this presentation because he's a board member of Salesforce.

Salesforce's spokeswoman Chi Hea Cho said Adobe was mentioned as a "benchmark" and sent us the following statement:

"Salesforce has a disciplined and thoughtful M&A process where we routinely survey the industry landscape across a wide range of companies, but acquire very few. The presentation is a broad survey of publicly traded companies in May 2016, and the appearance of company names on the list doesn't imply Salesforce ever intended to acquire them."

Salesforce has been buying companies at a record pace this year, spending over $4 billion on acquisitions. Some of the companies it bought include Demandware, which cost $2.8 billion, and Quip, which it paid $750 million for.